A16
Wallowa County Chieftain
NEWS
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Local fi re management offi cer back in Joseph
Nathan Goodrich
returns from
fi ghting fi res
in Australia
By Ellen Morris Bishop
Wallowa County Chieftain
After a month of bat-
tling Australia’s devastating
bush fi res, Nathan Goodrich
is back home in Wallowa
County. The Wallowa
Whitman National Forest
Wallowa Zone fi re manager
was one of 21 USFS fi re
experts who helped Austra-
lia try to quench its seething
landscape.
His work was part of an
agreement among the U.S.,
Mexico, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand to help
one-another control large
forest blazes. Goodrich, the
fi re management offi cer for
the Wallowa Valley Ranger
District, is based in Joseph.
Goodrich and the USFS
team were dispatched to
New South Wales, an Aus-
tralian state that is bigger
than Texas, but with a hilly
and sometimes cliff-rid-
den landscape typical of
Tennessee and the Appa-
lachians. “It’s rolling hills
that are heavily forested.
The trees are mostly decid-
uous, and most of them are
eucalyptus,” he said.
In Australia, Goodrich
served as an operation sec-
tion chief, a job similar
to his work with the For-
est Service. That included
dispatching crews and
resources as well as conduc-
tion suppression operations.
Along with a persistent
drought and a past fi re-sup-
pression policy similar to
ours, the trees themselves
contribute to the intensity
of the fi res, Goodrich said.
Eucalyptus trees contain
a lot of oil in their wood and
even in their leaves. That
makes their crowns burn
easily. Their bark is thin and
almost paper-like. When
a groundfi re sets it ablaze,
fl ames can easily climb up
the trunk
and
into
the
tree.
The highly
flammable
crowns also
send off a
Goodrich
lot of burn-
ing debris,
causing spot fi res.
“This sort of fl ammabil-
ity makes for a very short
natural fi re-return interval,
and also makes the fi res
more diffi cult to control,”
Goodrich said. “It’s more
like the return interval for
our grasslands (about 10
years here.)”
Fire suppression has pro-
duced a much more fl am-
mable landscape in Austra-
lia, just as it has in the U.S.
“The aboriginal peo-
ple here managed their
landscape in a way not
unlike Native Americans,”
Goodrich said. “When they
left a place, or when the
time was right, they would
set a fi re. Those fi res burned
mostly with low intensity.
Now, after a century of sup-
pressing fi re, a lot of Aus-
tralia has a fuels-surplus
problem.”
The number and avail-
ability of fi refi ghters poses
another problem for con-
trolling Australia’s bush
fi res. The Aussie fi refi ght-
ing system relies mostly on
volunteers, Goodrich said.
In New South Wales,
about 70,000 volunteers are
signed up and available to
fi ght fi res, but fewer than
2,500 are actually work-
ing. You need a large pool
of volunteers to draw from.
The volunteers have jobs
and other commitments.
Paid fi refi ghters in the
Rural Fire Service number
about 1,000. There are addi-
tional pros in other agencies
that include Fire and Res-
cue, Forestry, and the Park
Service, which is similar to
our USFS.
Right now in New South
Wales, there are 130 large
fi res burning, and perhaps
40 teams of about 10 to 20
volunteer and/or profes-
Nathan Goodrich
Active fi re behavior along Patty Road in early January.
sional fi refi ghters available.
“It’s a system that was
born of the fi re-brigade
days,” he said. “It would be
like Troy having a fi re bri-
gade, and Flora having one
and there being one in each
of all the little communi-
ties,” Goodrich said.
After the large fi res of
1994, the Aussies formal-
ized the Rural Fire Service
for better oversight of the
rural brigades.
“That means that each
team has to fi ght multi-
ple blazes,” Goodrich said.
“They have to make choices
and prioritize which ones to
control, to keep away from
structures or ignite back-
burns, and which ones
to just let go until more
resources are available.”
Those necessary choices,
he noted, may mean that the
neglected fi res can grow
very large. Some of the
Australian fi res are huge —
in excess of a million acres.
On days when the wind
comes up, or temperatures
are very high, there is a
ban on burning of all kinds,
including back-burning and
even burning in your back
yard.
“Fires move fast with the
wind. There’s no good way
to control them,” he said.
“You just wait. You are on
standby and ready to react
to fi res that might impact
structures.”
Some of the present
Aussie fi res have scorched
more than a million acres.
“In the U.S.,” Goodrich
said, “we have a nation-
wide total of maybe 50 or
60 fi res underway at a time,
not the 130 large fi res that
are burning now just in
New South Wales. There’s
a team on every fi re in the
U.S. In our big fi res —
which are now considered
to be 100,000 acres or more
— we have 500 to 700 and
sometimes more people
fi ghting them. The Austra-
lians are managing more
fi res with less people than
we would ever do.”
Fortunately, much of
New South Wales’ interior
is not densely populated.
“The houses are distrib-
uted a little like the land-
scape coming down from
Ruby Peak to Alder Slope,”
Goodrich said. “There’s
forest. And then there are
homes and small commu-
nities. Not many homes
in the area are built in the
urban-wildland interface.”
That
helps
mini-
mize loss of human life
and property. Nor did
Goodrich witness many
animals deceased or in
grave trouble.
“The wildlife all seem
to have fl ed the forest,” he
said. “With the drought,
there’s little food or water
there, and so animals have
generally moved to farm-
land and open areas where
they have more resources.”
But things are different
closer to the New South
Wales’ more-densely pop-
ulated coast.
“That’s where there are
more koalas that move
slowly and might try to
take refuge from the fi res
in the treetops,” he said.
“It’s also where people
have built homes in for-
ests. There ‘s much more
of an urban-wildland inter-
face problem there.”
Overall, Goodrich found
that the Aussies he worked
with managed to keep a
positive and often cheerful
attitude about things, even
when their landscape is in
fl ames. He admires Aus-
tralia’s national fi re plan,
which he feels has saved
lives and provides an
orderly and practiced way
for people who live in fi re-
prone areas to respond to
the threats of fi res.
“The national system
was developed after the
2009 Black Saturday Fire,”
he said. “More than 100
people died because they
waited too long in their
attempts to escape the fi re
and then the roads were
clogged, and they could
not evade the fl ames.”
Do dogs
innately
understand
some human
gestures?
By Anindita Bhadra
Indian Institute of Science
Education
If you have a dog, hope-
fully you’re lucky enough
to know that they are highly
attuned to their owners and
can readily understand a
wide range of commands
and gestures. But are these
abilities innate or are they
learned through training?
To fi nd out, a new study
in Frontiers in Psychol-
ogy investigated whether
untrained stray dogs could
understand human pointing
gestures.
The study revealed that
about 80% of participating
dogs successfully followed
pointing gestures to a spe-
cifi c location despite having
never received prior train-
ing. The results suggest that
dogs can understand com-
plex gestures by simply
watching humans and this
could have implications in
reducing confl ict between
stray dogs and humans.
Humans have bred dogs
with the most desirable and
useful traits so that they
could function as compan-
ions and workers. Trained
dogs are highly receptive to
commands and gestures.
However, it was not clear
whether dogs understand
us through training alone
or whether this was innate.
Can dogs interpret a gesture
without specifi c training or
even without having met
the signaling person previ-
ously? One way to fi nd out
is to see whether untrained,
stray dogs can interpret and
react to human gestures.
Confl icts between stray
dogs and humans are a prob-
lem and understanding how
humans shape stray dog
behavior may help alleviate
this.
Expect
More
Without
Paying
More.
Let us help you design the kitchen
and bath that matches your vision
and your budget. Our team of experts can
create everything from entry-level,
value cabinetry to semi-custom and
custom designs.
Creative Spaces.
Refreshing Places.
Get ready to get inspired
Visit our Carpet One Kitchen &
Bath Design Center
Clayton Lamm
800 S. River Enterprise, OR | 541-426-9228
www.carpetone.com
Cabinet & Countertop Specialist
Sales & Installation
Clayton@CarpetOneEo.com